Visit with Suzanne and Mary

July 12-17, 2012

Suzanne and Mary drove down from Newport on Thursday the 12th, arriving about midnight. We had planned to spend the day with them Friday, but we had the memorial service for Jerry Stargel, so we dropped them off at the Coke Museum and then joined them at the Georgia Aquarium at about 5.

Brenda and I joined the tour of the Aquarium. There are lots of nice photo settings, and everything is well designed.

We could see some nice dolphins in tanks, but to really see them strut their stuff, you had to go to the dolphin. With probably 500 people in the arena, they staged a spectacular show.

After the dolphin show we visited several living displays including spectacular lionfish from the Pacific and spiny lobsters, old friends from the Florida reefs.

There were big tanks teeming with fish, and shallow tanks with rays and sharks that you could touch.

In a big tank with hundreds of colorful cichlids from Africa there was this interesting turtle. There are more than 1500 cichlid varieties.

It wasn't just fish. There were snakes, frogs, and this amazing albino alligator.

It must be tough when all your friends are pirhanas! This is a healthy-looking fish, but his tail looks badly chewed!

Mary with the pirhanas!

The variety of fish is seemingly endless, and you can see them so well! These penguins seemed quite content with their environment. They had rocks to climb on, clear water to swim in, and no killer whales! This one dives and then cruises effortlessly in the crystal-clear water.

The huge tank is one of my favorite parts of the Aquarium. The large whale shark at the top in the photo above is one of four in the tank. Here the traffic is crowded for the bigger citizens of the large tank. Two large manta rays and two whale sharks.

The big whale shark was the dramatic figure in the blue water of the tank. In this view it is preceded by what appear to be Atlantic spadefish, which we saw on one occasion in the Keys while scuba diving.

After a pleasant tour of the Georgia Aquarium, we came out on the streets of Atlanta at about dusk. Above right is a view back toward the Coke museum with some of the buildings of downtown Atlanta behind.

A final view of downtown Atlanta centered on the Coke museum as we entered the parking deck of the Georgia Aquarium. The Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel is the cylindrical glass building in the center of that view, and the picture below was taken from the top floor of the hotel.

The above city shots were taken from the covered walkway leading from the Aquarium to the parking deck, and that location can be seen from the top of the Peachtree Plaza hotel as shown here. Our location for the pictures of the city was just to the right of the three slanted red roofs on the covered walkway on the side of the Aquarium just before it goes behind the parking deck.